16 tweets · January 2021 · 21 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
Hmmm... seeing this has me thinking about the nature of censorship and whether there's a way to do it better. In this thread I'm going to think out loud to grok the meaning of censorship both conceptually and pragmatically. (Context: POTUS banned from twitter today)
Conceptually: I forget where I got the phrase but someone pointed out to me there's a difference between "freedom of speech" (a vital right) & "freedom of reach". You have the right to speak your mind in the forums you are in, but you don't have the right to a megaphone.
"censorship" refers to many very different things. A few: 1. dictatorships in which you vanish/die if you're caught dissing leadership 2. self-censorship caused by fear of mobbing/cancelling 3. deplatforming, which in practice sometimes amplifies messages or polarization—oops.
Proponents of freedom of speech are broadly opposed to all of these, but it seems to me 1 & 2 are profoundly different than 3 as they employ *harsh punishment*, whereas deplatforming is more like "you don't have to go home but you can't stay here".
What we're talking about with tech censorship is much more like #3. The risk of losing your platform may be a deterrent—a kind of punishment—but on a different scale than 1 or 2. Losing your platform may set back your cause but it doesn't end or ruin your life.
The issue that we're facing here is one of symmetric vs asymmetric weapons. Banning someone from a platform can be done to anyone regardless of whether they're trying to use the platform to foment hate & violence or whether they're trying to use it to understand all views.
Remember: we're not going to get anywhere good trying to eliminate evil.
It is somewhat a historical contingency that people who make tech platforms have the technical power to decide who gets to do what on those platforms. But even within those orgs, who gets to decide, and why?
So the design question, of course, is "could a platform like twitter be modified to deeply *actually* incentivize both free speech *and* empathic listening, in ALL directions, without it losing its magic and having everyone (or half of everyone) just leave?"
Although there are two different things that "half of everyone" leaving could mean. If it's one side of a political polarity (along any axis) that would probably reinforce polarization, escalating tension medium-term though short-term the remaining side might feel relief & ease.
If instead the "half of everyone" who left was the most extreme people at multiple poles... well, this might create space for those who want to talk to others who see things differently and understand each other. Will extreme folks find other platforms? Ofc. They have already.
The generator of many of the above tweets feels related to the one that generated this voting system idea:
The obvious critique is "what if nobody gets 67%" and my main answer to that on a presidential scale is "well, there are succession laws. who is Speaker of the House?" Approximately this falls back to the prime-minister model used in UK & Canada already.
Too easy to game things like this 67% thing on smaller scales than elections though, if we were try to hold referendums on things like whether a given tweet is trying to communicate in good faith or not.
But there is the advantage that unlike changing an electoral system, with a privately-owned platform, to some extent the people who own it can decide how to run it, without having to pass votes in order to decide that.
I'm just thinking out loud here. Incentives are tough to manage. I don't know what I would do if I were @jack, and I don't envy him the position although I would love to help him make sense of what it might make sense to do with it. uhhh send tweet